Hey all, I brought this up on the IRC channel earlier and thought I'd put it to a wider audience.
A few days ago, I saw someones blog post[1] which described them giving their better half a machine with Ubuntu on and asking them to do some simple tasks. The results from which was quite interesting. My thought was why isn't something like this done on a larger scale. I propsed this to the IRC group this morning and was pointed to a similar thing Novell do[2]. Now based on this, there's no reason why we couldn't do something similar (if not better). The idea is generally that we create some tasks, from write a letter to Trudy, to connect to a wireless network, and then record someone doing said task. We'd need to video them doing the task, possibly the desktop, and their facial expression. This could then be fed back into the design of the user interface and the general user experience. It would also be a way to get some publicity. Now I'm not much of a gui person, so I'm not sure what information would be useful to the people that are, but even just talking to people and finding out what they think is right or wrong (even if their method of completing the task says otherwise) could be useful and/or interesting. If any gui people can think of useful data they'd want, then please let me know! We have had the idea of finding people who haven't used a computer before, but that might be more difficult in this modern age. The idea of testing the three major operating systems with different people is also not a bad one. Does anyone have any thoughts on this, or is it just a wild pipe dream that wouldn't be of any use to anyone? I'm open for to all comments and suggestions, please do say if you think it's a terrible idea and point out why. -Matt Daubney [1]http://contentconsumer.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enough-for-my-girlfriend/ [2]http://www.betterdesktop.org/blog/ -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.org/UKTeam/
